Lock Mode

If your school or district has Google and students login to a device with an account created within it, you can restrict students from navigating out of the tab their assessment is in.  When a student opens the Google Form in lock mode, they can’t open any other windows or tabs.

Problems:

• students may have issues opening the form when they’re not on a district-issued device
• lock mode sometimes doesn’t give students the option to start the quiz (Tip:  have them close and open the tab or window several times.  Eventually the “start quiz” button will show up.  It’s a pain, but it works!)
• students can still use the search bar on the top of their tab to type a math expression and see the answer (hopefully none of them are reading this!)

Import Questions

This was one of my favorite new features!  I was always so frustrated that I couldn’t just grab questions from two different forms and combine them into a new form.  Now, you can click “import” question in the toolbar on the right and select a form in your Google Drive to grab questions from.

Problems:

• When you choose the form you want to import from, you can’t really see the exact question you’re trying to import (Tip:  Open the form you’re importing from to see each question).

Grade by Question

This option is for questions that are open-ended or a short response, not multiple choice.

Sometimes it’s just easier to grade all the responses for one question at once.  In Forms, it will group any student responses that are exactly the same so that you can assign points to all of those responses one time (if they submitted the EXACT same answer – even spaces and capitalization will affect this).  If you’ve assigned something that requires a longer answer, you will have more variations on the responses.  Therefore, you will most likely have a different answer from every student.

Problems:

• If you try to start grading before all students are finished, two things will happen:
  • If you’re in the middle of scrolling and grading (either by question or by student) and a student submits their form, your screen will refresh.  Whatever you had done on that page will not have saved.
  • If you get through grading all of the questions, when other students submit theirs, you have to go back through all of them again.  It doesn’t automatically assign points to new submissions, even if the student had the same exact answer as one that had already been graded. You have to manually enter the point values again to all of the new responses (Tip:  wait until everybody is finished to grade them, or grade the remaining forms by student, one at a time).